In technical services, healthcare and other operational sectors, workloads consistently exceed available capacity. Experienced professionals are leaving and taking undocumented knowledge with them. Processes are becoming more complex, information requirements are increasing, and the time available to process that information is becoming increasingly scarce.

Digitalisation is the logical response and is already well under way in most organisations. There are scheduling systems, field service apps, digital forms and dashboards. Yet we see the same pattern among almost all the frontline professionals we observe: in practice, digital tools often feel like an additional burden rather than supporting them in their day-to-day workflow. The technology itself is not necessarily the cause. Usually, the solution has been designed around a platform strategy or process model, without taking the end user into account.

Organisations will continue to digitalise. The quality of that digitalisation depends on how well they understand the frontline before they start building. At fresk.digital, we start on the frontline by spending time alongside the professional who will ultimately use the solution. We call this method shadowing.
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What is shadowing?

During shadowing, a researcher accompanies a professional throughout their daily work. The observation takes place in the setting and at the moment when the work is actually carried out: in a care setting during a morning shift, in a plant room during a maintenance round, or in a service van on the way to the next customer. During a session like this, we look at the entire workflow. What steps does someone take? Which systems do they switch between? Where do delays occur? What information is missing? When is something entered twice? At what points does someone deviate from the formal process?

We only ask questions after we have seen something happen. This minimises the influence we have on behaviour and helps us understand afterwards why someone made a particular choice.

Shadowing reveals how work is carried out in practice, including everything that differs from the formal process. That is often where the most valuable insights lie.
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The gap between the work people describe and the work they actually do

Ask a professional what an average working day looks like and you will usually get a logical and reasonably complete answer. Spend a day shadowing them, and that picture often starts to change within ten minutes.

At one of our clients providing care for older people, for example, we shadowed care workers on a unit with 31 residents and two members of staff per shift.

Beforehand, a care worker told us that she received an alert whenever a resident called. She liked that. The alerts helped her know where she was needed. While shadowing her, we also saw the downside. While she was providing care to one resident, she was interrupted around ten times within ten minutes by new alerts. Each alert had to be checked. There could be something urgent, and the system did not distinguish between different types of call. Every time, the alert turned out to be from the same resident. There was no acute care need. The resident felt lonely and was seeking attention. That need was real and deserved attention, but it called for a different response from the one required in a medical or practical emergency. To the system, all calls were the same. Every alert appeared with the same level of urgency and demanded the care worker’s immediate attention.

The effect was visible. The care worker interrupted her task again and again, lost concentration and took considerably longer to complete the care task at hand. At the same time, she found it difficult to ignore the alerts. She had no way of knowing in advance what was behind the next call. When we had asked her about the system earlier, she had not mentioned this as a problem. The interruptions had become a normal part of the job. She had never seen what it would be like for the system to help her prioritise calls.

Shadowing allowed us to define the problem more precisely. The alerts themselves were necessary. The friction arose because the system offered no context for distinguishing urgent calls from less urgent ones. That distinction matters. Without the observation, we might have looked at ways to reduce the number of alerts or provide users with more configuration options. By shadowing the work, it became clear that the real need was support with prioritisation and triage.

The gap between the work people describe and the work they actually do is where many valuable insights are found. That gap is rarely visible on the surface. To find it, a researcher has to go beyond the point where a conversation ends, to the place and moment where the realities of the work can no longer be glossed over. This is not always comfortable, but that discomfort is often precisely the sign that you are close enough to reality to see what an interview would never have revealed.
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Discovering a problem is only half the work

Shadowing reveals where the work creates friction. Then comes the work of translating those observations. We turn our observations into concrete design and technical decisions. What information needs to be available, and when? Which step can be removed? Where does a solution need to support mobile use? And which action can be made simpler?

A well-understood problem gives direction to the solution. Even then, only practice will show whether the choices really fit the way people work. That is why shadowing remains valuable throughout the design and development process. We return to the professionals and let them use the solution in their own working environment. We watch where someone hesitates, which steps come naturally, which features are skipped and where another workaround still emerges.

That is what we did with the service engineers at Hertek Safety. Based on our earlier observations, we developed a digital solution that fits the sequence and conditions of their day-to-day work.

When we returned to let them test the solution, their response was immediate: they did not want to give the tool back. Their enthusiasm was great to see, but their behaviour told us even more. The engineers could carry out their work without separate notes or duplicate data entry. The solution followed the natural sequence of their work and did not require a new workaround to be usable.
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Close enough to the real work

The most important friction points rarely announce themselves. A care worker quickly comes to see the tenth interruption in ten minutes as part of an ordinary shift. A service engineer gets used to typing up notes later. As long as the work gets done in the end, such actions are hardly recognised as a problem.

They only become visible when we get close enough to see them happen. That is where the value of shadowing lies:

• We first map the actual workflow, including the detours, interruptions and tacit knowledge that can easily remain hidden in a conversation.
• From those observations, we define the right problem and translate it into an appropriate solution.
• We then return to the same environment to see whether that solution holds up under real-world conditions.

Ultimately, a digital solution should mean less work, less frustration and fewer unnecessary actions for the professional. That is only possible when we first understand what the work truly demands.

That is why shadowing is the foundation of everything we build: from the first observation to final validation on the frontline.